Category: Uncategorized

Montgomery College Tackles Remote Teaching and Learning

As schools throughout the country prepare for the fall semester, the success of students will hinge in part on the preparedness of the faculty. Specifically, pedagogical and technological preparedness.

Montgomery College, a two-year community college in Montgomery County, Maryland, was impacted like every other educational institution by COVID-19 beginning in March. Faculty who historically had not used various online tools had to scramble to move into a remote environment. It was the Wild West of online teaching.  Whatever worked to keep students engaged was fair game: video, email, telephone, texting apps, learning management system and even traditional snail mail.

Jeff Selingo, in a July 16 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, said that instead of institutions worrying about Plexiglass and other virus barriers, leaders should turn their attention to embracing remote learning. “If colleges continue to succumb to shortsightedness and have nothing to offer next semester but another diminished online educational experience, the repercussions could be felt for years to come,” Selingo wrote.

Playing to its strength of agility and realizing that an unfocused approach could not continue into the summer and fall, Montgomery College decided in the spring that summer and fall classes would be fully online or in a remote setting. The College embarked on a Herculean task of training all faculty who never taught online for remote teaching. As a result, a seven-week required Structured Remote Teaching (SRT) training was developed by a team of faculty, staff and administrators and offered to about 700 full-time and part-time faculty using CARES Act funding.  Participants received instruction rooted in best practices and guidance from a team of instructional designers and 31 faculty mentors.

This training, offered by the Office of E-learning, Innovation and Teaching Excellence (ELITE), combined synchronous and asynchronous components to focus on pedagogy and technology. Course design and training were centered around student engagement, with participants being reminded throughout that students would be coming to classes with the pandemic and social unrest playing out in the world around them.

  • Blackboard Essentials
  • Collaborate Ultra and Zoom
  • Text Editor
  • Assessments
  • Grade Center
  • Communication Tools
  • Embedded Support Resources
  • Discipline-based Best Practice

While the training was not prescriptive in nature, each section or module did require participants to complete a quiz.  A capstone project had to be developed that included learning modules, communication tools and assessments. Only after completion and successful review by an instructional designer was the faculty approved to teach in the upcoming semesters.

It was important for college leadership to emphasize that while faculty were not expected to have a cookie-cutter template for each course, students would benefit from having courses that were easy to navigate.  This common student experience is expected to aid in course retention and completion.

The faculty at Montgomery College responded in incredible ways.  While they acknowledged the training was intense, they also understood the pedagogical transformation within their courses.  One part-time faculty recently stated that he compared the course he created this summer with his emergency remote course, and the contrast was numbing. Another participant stated, “SRT training has taken face-to-face teaching to a new and higher level. Professors, even professors who would have been considered well organized in a traditional classroom setting, must think through every “move” to weave classes seamlessly so that student interest is maintained, especially in long evening classes.” And yet another said, “No one likes change, but (this training has) done an incredible job at facilitating an unbelievable pivot to the future in the midst of a very trying time.”

While this initial training has been successful, we realize that if we are to meet the complex needs of our students moving forward, we will have to continue to re-imagine education. SRT 2.0 will include an even stronger focus on the academic disciplines and the content faculty deliver.  Program advising will be take center stage. Online support services such as tutoring and embedded coaching will be enhanced.

Montgomery College has leaned into remote learning. Post-COVID we will be an institution that will be able to boast about even stronger academics and support services.

Do Not Let COVID-19 Kill the Quality of Online Teaching

As every higher education institution and K-12 school in the country has had to shift to some form of remote teaching, misconceptions abound comparing what we are currently doing to effective online teaching.

Online teaching and remote teaching are not one and the same.

Many faculty who transitioned quickly to remote teaching as a result of COVID-19 did so with little regard to instructional design; content was quickly put together for delivery over a synchronous video-conferencing platform. Learning Management Systems were thrust into the fore, but faculty had to be quickly trained on all the tools: gradebooks, discussion boards, assessments. It was the Wild West education episode.

But now, across the country, we hear cries from some faculty that they are ready to teach fully online because they have been teaching in a remote environment for several weeks. We cannot let COVID-19, and the rush to remote instruction, kill the quality of online teaching that so many of us have been focused on — and helped to enhance — for years.

Community colleges are poised to help win that battle. Our faculty are engaged in the scholarship of teaching, not just the scholarship of research. And our students, many of whom are working or taking care of children or elders, need the flexibility during this pandemic that fully online courses bring. They expect quality courses.

Not only will the institutions be harmed but, more importantly, our students will suffer. If institutional leaders rush to compare remote instruction with online teaching, the naysayers of online education may point fingers and say, “I told you.” They may suggest that online courses are thrown together, and consequently, students cannot digest content and success is impacted. They may say that the in-depth training that our institutions provide for teaching online is exaggerated. “After all,” they may say, “you let me teach in an online environment after two days of training. Why do I need weeks of preparation?”

An article in Educause Review last month highlighted the concern:

Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody making the transition to online teaching under these circumstances will truly be designing to take full advantage of the affordances and possibilities of the online format.

We have to fight against these temptations. Now is the time for the online community to tout its successes and to talk about the positive impact quality design has on student achievement. To do anything less allows the educational naysayers to claim victory.

References

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning 2020 Charles B. Hodges, Stephanie Moore, Barbara B. Lockee, Torrey Trust, and M. Aaron Bond. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.

World Access to Higher Education

Today marks the second annual World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED), a day designed to highlight global inequalities and to create a call for local, regional and international action.  I cannot think of a better entity to fulfill this mission than a community college, and specifically, Montgomery College.

WAHED primarily has a European focus, organized by the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), which is the United Kingdom group whose aim is to increase higher education access.  NEON provides a few startling statistics about higher education access:

  • Across the 76 lowest income countries, the poorest people are 20 times less likely to complete a higher education course than the richest.
  • Across 23 countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a child’s chances of participating in tertiary education are twice as high if at least one of their parents has completed upper-secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education.

But make no mistake, access to higher education isn’t just an international concern.  It’s a concern in Montgomery County, Maryland as well.  There are pockets of communities in Montgomery County where higher education is a fleeting dream, a thought that exists only in the deep recesses of residents’ minds.

Montgomery College is doing its best to change that mindset.

From access to community engagement centers, three campuses across the county, online degrees and zero-cost textbook courses, and low tuition, Montgomery College makes a strong statement in being the community’s college.  Providing access to quality higher education for the residents of Montgomery County improves the economic lifestyle for everyone.

It is for these reasons that I’m happy to help support WAHED 2019.  Maybe we call it locally MCAHED 2019.